I made a clean install of Linux Mint 13 LTS on my SSD which is in the optical drive bay.

Now, I will use the HDD for data storage and I don't want the old data there where I just have installed the original Win 7 which cames with the laptop (ThinkPad T530) and Linux Mint (mint4win). The laptop is new and there is not any personal data on the HDD. So, I have to format it from NTFS to Ext4 and also I want to mount it automatically on startup. For now I have access to the data there but I have to mount the drive manually each time. The standard software which cames with Mint is Disk Utility (installed GParted, too) but I'm not sure what to do.

Any idea how to do this?

Note: I asked here because Mint 13 LTS is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, so there shouldn't be something different.

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BraiamAug 14 '13 at 15:08

You want to format your HDD so that it contains only 1 ext4 partition of full disk size, and you want to automount it at startup, right?
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Aaditya BaggaAug 14 '13 at 15:08

@AadityaBagga, yes, exactly. Actually I should make a 4GB swap partition, too, but this could be done later.
–
enenenAug 14 '13 at 16:10

1 Answer
1

Open the Gparted application, and select your device (HDD) from the top right corner (it would be labelled as /dev/sdb or /dev/sda). Verify that its correct before proceeding furthur.

There would now be a number of partions displayed which are present on your HDD.
Right click on each , and select Delete.
This would Delete all the partitions.
Click on the accept icon /button in the menu to make the changes permanent.

Now you would have only a single block of unallocated space.

;and you can create your desired partitions.

right click on the unallocated space, click on new.

Just change the type to ext4 instead of ext2, rest all options as is.

This would create your desired ext4 partition. Click on accept button to write the changes to disk.

P.S.will post more later.

How to automount a partition on startup

1.) First you will need to create a mount point, that is, a location/folder where the mounted partition will appear.

For example you want the ext4 partition to appear as the folder Data in your home directory, for that you would have to create the folder using-

sudo mkdir /home/<your user name>/Data

Data is the name of the folder, you could choose any like MyData or LinuxData etc

2.)Now you need to find out the UUID of the partition you want to automount.For that,

In a terminal, type

sudo blkid

This would list all your partitions and their UUIDs. From here you need to copy the UUID of your desired partition (the data partition that you have just now created).Copy it.

3.)Now we need to make changes to /etc/fstab, so that your partition is mounted at startup automatically.

in the terminal type-

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Inside this file there will be a list of partitions. Now you need to make entry for your desired partition.

so file system is the UUID, dir is the directory where partition is being mounted, type is the type of file system, eg ext4, options are for specifying options like ro (readonly), and dump and pass are for checking the filesystem during startup

I created two new partitions: 4GB for swap and the rest for data storage. Everything looks ok but I have some questions. How to make the data storage partition auto-mountable on startup? Is it from /etc/fstab as for the swap partition? What should I write in the columns where I wrote swap swap sw for the swap partition for auto-mounting the data storage partition? Probably it would be ext4 but not sure for the last column (sw) before the integers (0 0).
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enenenAug 14 '13 at 18:30